Taking the Long View
by Lucillia
Summary: What if Palpatine had been given much stronger precognitive abilities back when he was young, back in the days when all he cared about were racing and pissing off his father? If he'd known how much work becoming Supreme Ruler of the Galaxy would be back during his teenage years, would he have even bothered?


Palpatine - who had ditched his first name because it belonged to his bastard father - had always been able to see the future. So, when the Muun with an air of destiny about him had come purposefully striding towards him as he spoke with his mentor Vidar Kim, he knew that the bright future he'd been waiting for had just come knocking. Opening his mind to the myriad wandering pathways in time to see what this all important Muun had to offer, he turned his focus to the future ahead of him...

_Meetings, endless boring meetings long after he'd planned to put his five mandatory years in the Legislative Youth behind him like it was a bad dream...Schmoozing with people whose throats he'd rather tear out for some all important goal...Raising a bratling only to watch it die of its own stupidity...Spending several years listening to some teenager's petty problems in order to snare him only to be stuck with him after he became something of a liability...Getting into a fight with a Jedi master and being stuck with a face that looked like the back end of a Shaak for the rest of his life...Destroying the Jedi Order and becoming Emperor of the Galaxy only to have everyone trying to beg, borrow, or steal a piece of his time for the next 23 years while a bunch of idiots ran around his Empire doing what had to be their level best to wreck it, and that didn't even include the Rebels...Dying at the hands of the pathetic teenager from before when he tried to kill his man's son, causing the galaxy to tip back towards the Light...Watching completely impotent from his place in the Dark Side as it is proven to him over and over again that every time the balance tips towards Darkness it's only so the Light could rise back up again and crush it back down as the pendulum swings back and forth towards a middle that is ruled neither by darkness nor by light_...

On the other hand, Mitt was getting arrested for Public Intoxication in 3, 2, 1, Now, Mitt's stash of Gungan Grass was still in his room where it hadn't been found by his parents who'd dropped by to visit only to find their son besmirching the family name, he had the keycode and if he followed that future...

Chucking the coin that the Muun had given him in the trash as soon as the Sith was gone, he turned to make his way to Mitt's room to snag his stash before his parents found it while they packed his belongings in order to bring him home.

Two days later, Cosinga Palpatine didn't know whether to shoot his son or himself for fathering him. Apparently, his son had gotten high and took that speeder he'd bought him on a joyride and killed yet another pedestrian. This time, since the pedestrian was an influential Muun, he couldn't protect his son from the coming consequences. Heck, he couldn't protect himself from the consequences of his son's actions. The family was ruined, and it was all the fault of that brat who he'd known from day one would destroy them all...

**Alderaan 65 Years Later...**

A man who had been many things in life, including a wanted fugitive, the galaxy's first Human Pod Racer, and a hero of the Republic when the Defense had found a way to prove at his trial that the important pedestrian he'd run down when he was seventeen had been a Sith Lord, sat gazing up at the sky smoking a handrolled cigarette that contained a proscribed substance reflecting on the way his life could have gone if he'd tipped it one way or the other. Both the Jedi and the Sith, few that they were, who sat playing their little games trying to tip the balance of the Galaxy to the Light or the Dark as if it were a teeter-totter were a bunch of idiots as far as he was concerned, as true balance lay in the moment when neither were ascendent, a moment he'd sought to preserve for as long as he could as he'd found that he profited best from a situation where things were neither-nor.

"You know, in another universe, my giant space station would be destroying this planet right about now..." Palpatine said to an oddly tattooed Dathomirian Zabrak who was laying in the grass next to the bench on which he was seated.

"Yeah, whatever Dad. Pass the joint." the Zabrak who ran one of the galaxy's best pit crews said.

On Tatooine, a shudder ran through a Jedi trained Tusken Raider named A'Sharad Hett as the feeling that he'd somehow dodged a bullet re-emerged much as it had first appeared sixteen years earlier. Dismissing it, he went back to his task of uniting the peoples of Tatooine under a banner of peace as he headed a summit between the Raiders, the moisture farmers, the Jawas and certain other influential elements that had been decades in the making.

On Coruscant, Obi-Wan Kenobi wondered at the feeling he'd had yet again that there was something missing from his life, something that was both loved and hated, something that was both terrible and great. Dismissing it since a Jedi wasn't supposed to crave such emotions, he returned to the side of his elderly former master who sat in the quarters they once shared going over the holos he'd collected over a long life. His could end up being one of the last generations of the Jedi Order as young Jedi kept disappearing at a rapid rate and turning up in places they had no intention of leaving as they were exceedingly happy with the new lots in life they had found as they explored their new environments.

On Mandalore, the long-retired Bounty Hunter Jango Fett sat at the Oyu'baat surrounded by his friends and family. He had been Mandalore for a good long time, and was considered one of the best. Near the fire, old Kal Skirata sat napping with his ankle propped up on a cushion. Skirata's life could have ended up being a sad story what with his children preferring to live their lives as Aruetiise and barely speaking to him but, one night some practical joker had dumped a gift-wrapped Jedi on his doorstep. Bardan Skirata ended up turning out to be one of the best sons a man could ask for.

Out in the stars, Admiral Mitth'raw'nuruodo of the Republic Judicial Forces sat conversing about possible Far Outsider sightings with his second in command Gilad Pellaeon as they stood aboard the Dreadnought Chimera. He had ended up in the Republic nearly twenty years before after he'd been essentially shanghaied from his exile by a strange spacer who'd hustled him aboard his ship yelling something about how he wasn't going to let some stinking Yuuzhan Vong destroy everything he'd built if there was anything he could do about it. After spending several days being fed and looked after by an oddly marked Zabrak who had claimed that his "father" could see the future, he'd been dumped outside of the Academy of Carida on whose lawn he'd stood in confusion as the Commandant who'd clearly been expecting him came up to greet him.

The rest of the Galaxy including Prince Han Organa of Alderaan didn't realize that anything was missing for the most part. Just about everything was at peace at the moment, and that's just how they liked it, especially Palpatine. War wasn't good for the racing industry in which Palpatine Racers Inc. ruled supreme after all.

Palpatine smiled and nodded to Security Officer who was doing a patrol of the local park he and his boy were hanging out in. The man who wasn't the sort to roust someone over a minor drug infraction nodded back, pretending he could neither see nor smell the cigarette that was currently in Maul Palpatine's hand. Sprawling languorously on the bench that was set on the lawn his adopted son was sprawled out on, he turned his attention back to the sky as the officer passed, a sky that was mercifully free of a moon-sized space station.

Ruling the universe with an iron fist as Supreme Emperor was all well and good, but it came with a raft of troublesome responsibilities and obligations and whatnot as well as any number of enemies that would topple you in a heartbeat if they could. As it was, he had everything he wanted right now. Should he want anything else, he just had to look down the long web of probability and pull on the strings that would bring it straight to him.

As he gazed up in the stars knowing that the planet he was standing on would have been gone right now if he'd let fate run its course, he smiled. He had changed that course, just as he'd changed the course of the Galaxy, undoing a millennium of work done by the Sith just as he had undone a sizable portion of the Jedi Order by showing those who knew no other life the number of possibilities that were open to them if they left.

He was the true ruler of the Galaxy just as he'd wanted to be when he was young, and best of all, since nobody knew it, they couldn't take it from him...


End file.
